Field Work in Computational Creativity

Numerous scientific disciplines, e.g. social sciences, benefit from field work. What does field work look like in Computational Creativity and what are its potential benefits to research? We refer to the effort of actively making a system or its artifacts widely accessible outside the academia world, and as such getting feedback, as ‘field work’. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences taking our systems, Alysia and MEXICA, out into the wild terrain by making them broadly available. In the case of Alysia, the system itself was made accessible; MEXICA’s artifacts (stories) were shared through a traditionally published book for a broad readership. We consider the utility of field work for these vastly different systems on the CC continuum (Pérez y Pérez 2018), and discuss potential benefits to other research in the area. Finally, we discuss the necessity of developing methodology to enable rigorous registration of knowledge arising from field work in Computational Creativity.